A little bit of everything

On our way to a graduation open house Saturday we passed by these poppies growing along White Lake. They were beautiful swaying with the wind off the water. My good friend Beverly collected a large amount of fabric and a few weeks ago drove down to Gee's Bend and delivered it to the quilters there. (and no, she doesn't know anyone there and they didn't know she was coming). A quilter there gave her this wonderful small wall hanging she made as a thank you. She calls the design Brick Layer. It was designed and made by Mary Ann Pettway.

The back shows the free style hand quilting.

Our speaker at guild this month was Laurie Simpson. She designs a lot of "Americana" type patterns and her and her sister design fabric lines for Moda under the name Minick & Simpson. She's been quilting for around 30 years and bought her first sewing machine 8 years ago, a Singer Feather weight. Most of her quilts are hand pieced and quilted. She works a lot with wool fabric. I loved them. The following are a few of her quilts. This first one is a wool summer/ sailboat wall hanging.

Laurie's sister is a rug hooker. A lot of the quilts Laurie makes her sister makes a coordinating rug. This is her hooked star rug, she uses old wool clothing. Laurie with her wool star quilt.

This wool quilt Laurie made to hang in her dinning room and coordinates with her vintage Fiesta ware dishes.

Her sisters matching hooked table topper with wool "tongues" along the edge.

Laurie free hand cut wool circles for this quilt, while her sister hooked the vine surrounding the quilt.

If your interested in learning more about her and her quilts she has a wonderful blog http://minick%20and%20simpson.blogspot.com/

Memorial Day weekend

Nothing is better than a obligation free long holiday weekend, beginning Saturday I quilted this mariners compass I pieced of few years ago. I love the background fabric on this piece, it so represents my family members that come from all over the world. I also finished my round robin compass and hung it up in the gable end of my dye studio. It looks wavy on the edges due to the fact I have it pinned between the different height frame boards of the structure. I also found a good place to put some of my natural dyed yarn.

On Sunday I packed my hand quilting and went to a pow wow with my husband. A native women did this bead work on the back of her vest. She told me this was her husbands favorite t-shirt and when he died she beaded it and sewed it on the back of her vest to honor him.

When one of the dancers came by I realized years ago I had natural dyed his breech clout and sewed a silk binding on the edge. I'm not sure if I used onion skins or turmeric but the color was still beautiful.

Monday morning we packed a picnic lunch and spent the day boating on the river. It was so beautiful and peaceful. After all winter it feels so good to see green!

My husband motoring our boat.

We try to stay off the main branch of the river and take the little tributaries, there's so much more wild life there. The water lillies were just beginning to open. The color was beautiful.

This is a huge blue heron taking off from the lillies.

Along one of the banks this huge turtle was sunning himself. His neck and head are on the right side.

Students teaching me new dying tricks

I have my dye studio open and a pot of comfrey presoaking, waiting for the fabric. Comfrey is an medicinal herb and it is suppose to give a green dye color, we'll see. This is my friend Windi, a couple of summers ago I had a dye class and taught her and her friends natural dying. Now, she leading her own dying class for her Renaissance (Kings, Queens, Knights and castles etc.) group. She came over and we went into our woods collecting plants to dye with. Here she's holding wild onions for the kids in the group to taste test (she also heads up the children's craft group.

The fiddle heads ferns are beautiful, she picked a few a those to try.

We've had a nice raining spring and the creek was overflowing it's banks. I love to see the sunlight coming threw the woods on the water.

I couldn't resist showing another picture.

These are a few of her class samples. The indigo is linen, it was beautiful. I think I'm going to try playing with linen some day. How easy is it to make a linen quilt? The rest are wool.

Windi is a very creative person (this picture I took a couple of years ago when I was teaching the class, I don't know why it uploaded so small). She is dying several yards of wool here to make into a cloak and wanted different color bands. She rigged up this rack and has the stove and dye pot underneath the fabric. She's dying it with cochineal.

Her fabric is drying on the right. The other fabric is Becky's, she tied hers to achieve different designs. Hers also was made into a cloak. You can see Windi's has a wide white band yet. The next day we dyed it with indigo.

This is Windi now, modeling her finished cloak, she is quite clever! My lilacs are beautiful this year.

Round Robin Quilt

I haven't blogging lately due to computer problems, I could not up load my photos, but I'm up and going now. A couple of years ago I did a round-robin quilt exchange with one of my quilt bees. We all began by making our own mariner compass block then sending the block with extra fabrics around to each other in January. At our Christmas party the next Dec. we got our quilt top back. They were all wonderful. This was mine, I've finally begun machine quilting it, hopefully I will finished it this week.

I went to a lecture on color by Kaffee Fassett last week. He lives in England and is very well known for his knitting, needlepoint, quilt patterns and books. He is also well known for the fabrics he designs. A lot of designers now use the computer to color in their fabric design, Kaffee still hand paints all of his.

I love this picture (it was a slide on the screen). This is a picture of his dinning room, a little busy, but wonderful! It reminds me of his fabrics he designs.

His books are a feast for the eyes. I love how he photographs his quilts with nature. This is one of his first books and I think they keep getting better.

This is one of the pictures in the book, it reminds me of his dinning room. (of course this wouldn't be one of the outdoor pictures).

A lot of the women at the lecture were knitters, this women is working on a afghan pattern that is popular around here now. Knitters are exchanging their left over sock yarn and knitting little bias squares with tiny needles.

She has great color sense.

Well, my vacation is over and it's back to the real world. When we came home I began spring cleaning the house, went back to work and then late Sunday night my husband was diagnosed with pneumonia, its been a long week. He's starting to feel a little bit better today but it worries me with the swine flu going around. I haven't done much quilting but I did make this card with my natural dyed wool for my girlfriend. She is cooking this weekend for a Christian women's retreat. For the women on the retreat she took tea bags and changed the paper tag to one with a Bible verse on it, hence the tea cup card.

On out way to Florida we stopped at the Canton Museum of Art, on exhibit was a collection of 40, 8 ft. landscape art silk kimomo from Japan. The collection was breathtaking! It featured Mount Fuji in autumn and winter. The kimono hung along side eachother making a panaramic view of the mountain. Itchiku Kubota, the Japanese artist created them with layering dyes, inks, and embroidery. It took him 26 years to figure out the lost art of tsujiganhana dying. When he was 60 he started the Mt. Fuji series. He died before it was finished. One interesting fact he is the only artist to have his collection shown at the Smithonian museum while he was still alive.

Of course you could not photograph any of the collection. This vintage kimono hung in the entrance.

This life size fabric and paper cherry tree also graced the entrance.

And on to Florida where we brought the boys new fishing poles, here their trying them out in the small lake behind their home. They got pretty good at casting. Mom usually dresses the triplets alike.

I thought this was a cute picture, big brother walking the littlest one home. The oldest one is so good to his little brothers.

Here we are dying Easter Eggs, big brother went to play football with the neighbors. He's growing up.

One day we went to a children's Science museum, this is the opening of the "body works".

My last picture is my grandsons (not the blonde) at their friends house for Passover, wearing their yamikas (sp?). My daughters good friends are Jewish and invited them over for the Passover celebration.

Quilt guild & Happy Easter

One of the quilt guild members made these cute Easter cookies for the meeting last night. Our gust speaker was Kay England, she said one thing she loves is cookies.

This is Kay giving her very funny lecture and great trunk show. We laughed from the moment she got on stage until she finished. I highly recommend her for your guild programs. This is her tribute to Betsy Ross quilt. Some of the information she gave on Betsy was she "supposedly" taught George Washington how to make a 5 pointed star. We don't know if she made the first American flag but she did design and make many. She out lived 3 husbands.

This is Kay's favorite antique quilt, a nine patch from the civil war era.

This Burgoyne surrounded quilt is also from the civil war era. Kay hand quilted this one.

We also had our annual Earth Day quilt show, I took a few pictures of some of my favorites. This first bug is from a pattern.

This clown fish I believe is also from a pattern. Her colors were beautiful.

This was my favorite, I love the bug jars and wonderful little sayings and poems were sewed on.

One of our guild members doesn't quilt, she's a rug hooker. I love this rug, the style is Pennsylvania Dutch done in the fraktur method. Ok, what that means I can't remember. She design the rug and washed some of the wool together so the colors would run into each other and tone them down.

My husband and I are leaving for Florida to spend Easter with our kids and grandchildren. Part of their Easter basket goodies are these pillow cases I made them. My friend Mary has a wonderful sewing machine that does embroidery, she put their names on them.
I hope you have a Blessed Easter and I'll see you April 20.

Signs of Spring

Being very tired of winter and painting, last weekend I packed a picnic lunch and my husband and I took a drive in the woods looking for signs of spring. We came across this big flock of turkeys, and as they say in the Bambi movie, I think the Toms are "twitter painted".

A lot of the farms were collecting the maple syrup as it begins to run.

And my friend Lillian made a new summer purse, it's beautifully lined with zipper pockets and of course she made a matching check book cover.

Being in Michigan just because the calender says it's spring the weather doesn't always cooperate, we're suppose to be getting between 3 to 6 " of snow in the next few days. My girlfriends came over the other night for bee and wore their finished wool scarves (although no one would model for me). It was fun to see from one pile of wool we all shared, how different they all looked. You could tell whose scarf belonged to who just by the color. The first one is Laura's.

Mine.

Joni, who left the Abercrombe (sp?) label on the patch.

And Cathy O's. A couple others didn't get theirs finished yet.